Beverly hillbilly

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Gillian Welch sings of the sort of people - coal miners,
dirt-poor farmers, moonshiners, morphine addicts and wayfaring
gamblers - that many of her critics thought too Appalachian for a
California girl. By Sophie Best.

When Gillian Welch was a girl, growing up with her adoptive
parents in California, thoughts of her real father's identity
filled her mind. "All I knew," says Welch in measured tones as
dreamily slow as her singing voice, "was my father was some
musician who would have been coming through New York City at the
beginning of 1967."

She pauses, as if to contemplate the possibilities, and laughs
heartily. "And it's like, well! That's interesting!"

It's easy to imagine that the young woman who was to become a
diligent student and connoisseur of American music forms as diverse
as bluegrass, folk, country and rock'n'roll might have fantasised a
famous father for herself from any of those genres.

"I can't deny that as a teenager it was certainly tantalising to
try to think of what musician my dad could be," she admits. "It'd
be too embarrassing to say, but as a kid, sure, I thought about
it."

Welch has touched on the experience of adoption in her music,
echoing older traditions of storytelling and balladry with tales of
hardship and sorrow. Her 1996 debut, Revival, opened with
the poignant Orphan Girl: "I have no mother/No father/No
sister/No brother/I am an orphan girl." Revival and its successor,
Hell Among the Yearlings, were populated with characters
from bygone times - coal miners, dirt-poor farmers, moonshiners,
morphine addicts and wayfaring gamblers.

Then Welch and her partner David Rawlings again collaborated
with the producer of both the albums, the legendary T-Bone Burnett,
on the Grammy-winning soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art
Thou?, which revived the mass-market appeal of old-time
country, bluegrass and Depression-era music, selling more than five
million copies.

The next Gillian Welch album, Time (The Revelator) ,
was rich with metaphor and sweeping in scope and ambition,
interweaving personal memories with momentous historical
narratives.

Her most recent offering, last year's Dylanesque Soul
Journey , contains her most stark personal statements.

"There was way less camouflage between myself and the songs,"
she said of Soul Journey at the time. The lyrics dealt
with family and identity, most explicitly in the bare-facedly
autobiographical No One Knows My Name : "Oh, my mother was
just a girl of 17/And my dad was passin' through, doing things a
man will do."

"No One Knows My Name - that's real. That's my story. I
think I was uncovering some personal mythology and what-not in that
record."

Welch points out that the mystery surrounding her birth parents
is emblematic of the greater mysteries that underlie anybody's
confrontation with identity and destiny.

"I think it's mysterious for everybody," she muses. "Let me say
that first. How people become the people they are is a very
mysterious thing. And I just have a little extra mystery thrown in,
y'know?"

Welch has had to contend with more questioning of her artistic
motives than most musicians. From early in her career, questions of
authenticity and birthright were levelled by critics who were
sceptical about Welch, with her privileged, west coast upbringing,
appropriating the musical traditions of Appalachian
mountain-dwellers.

Looking back on the controversy, which subsided as the critical
acclaim mounted, Welch is bemused. "There was this weird thing of
when people started to criticise my right to play the kind of music
I played, because I was from California," she says. More bizarrely,
her defenders seized on the mystery of her origins. Surely, they
argued, someone with such innate feeling for traditional music must
have a hillbilly bloodline.

"There were people who took it and ran with it, like maybe my
blood really was from North Carolina. People went crazy with that.
And it's all hilarious, y'know? Because I'll go back to the first
thing I said - how anybody is who they are is mysterious, let alone
someone who creates stuff. I think artists are extra-mysterious.
How does anyone make anything? And why?"

Welch was guided towards music by her adoptive parents. "They
both write music," she explains. "My mom's a singer - she sang with
Benny Goodman - and my dad's a piano player." They met at an
audition and performed as a comedy duo, Ken and Mitzie Welch, and
wrote music for television, commercials and Broadway, moving to Los
Angeles when Welch was three years old to write for Carol Burnett's
TV show.

Gillian Welch's upbringing was loving and somewhat sheltered.
When she enrolled at the University of California at Santa Cruz, a
new world opened up. She discovered drink, drugs, alternative
music, art and photography. But the most radical discovery Welch
made at college was bluegrass music. She fell in with a bluegrass
crowd, living in a share-house full of musicians and playing in a
covers band. By the end of the 1980s, her life seemed to be
drifting. At the urging of her parents, she moved to Boston to
pursue more serious musical studies at the prestigious Berklee
College of Music.

It was in a corridor at Berklee that she met David Rawlings.
They were waiting for an audition, just as her adoptive parents had
been when they met and fell in love in the 1950s. For their's is
also a love story.

"The music school we went to was basically a jazz school," Welch
says, "which is funny, because we were both somewhat out of place.
We met at the audition for the one country band at the school. And
we both got in."

Rawlings and Welch share an uncanny musical connection; their
songwriting, close harmony singing and acoustic guitar duets are
instinctive, deeply intimate. Although they're a duo, they perform
as Gillian Welch. That's how they billed themselves when they moved
to Nashville in 1992, and Welch would perform at
songwriter-in-the-round nights with Rawlings as accompaniment. They
haven't seen the need to change it to Gillian Welch and David
Rawlings. The equality and interconnectedness of their partnership,
the impossibility of one existing without the other, is immediately
evident in their music.

"It's very intense for my partner and I - we're listening in an
incredibly focused and intense way," she says of performing with
Rawlings. "I don't even think Dave sees anything all night; he
largely has his eyes closed.

"We're just listening to this little landscape that we create,
y'know? I don't really know how else to describe it. It's like I
turn my other senses off and it's all about sonic stuff.

The music that Welch and Rawlings make has a compellingly
other-worldly quality. There's an opiated languor and hypnotic lull
to their slowed-down songs, a harmonic interplay between two voices
and stringed instruments that is at once extraordinary and wholly
natural.

"The thing that I really enjoy about when we're playing music,"
Welch says, "is the more fragile elements of the sound that
acoustic guitars make. I think of these as like the upper
overtones, the most ethereal part of the sound that acoustic
instruments make. It's the stuff that seems to just rise up into
the air and hang there.

"When we're really playing well, those overtones that I'm making
and the overtones that Dave's making, they really do seem to rise
up and to combine, almost like an ether, and that's when I'm really
having a good time." She laughs, and continues: "That's also when I
don't know precisely what part of the cumulative sound we're making
is coming from me and what part is coming from Dave. Because it's
all combining on so many levels."

Welch and Rawlings have lent their distinctive vocal and guitar
stylings to many other artists' work, with a resume of guest
appearances on recordings by Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, bluegrass
legend Ralph Stanley and, most recently, Nashville string band the
Old Crow Medicine Show and English eccentric Robyn
Hitchcock. Welch recalls their contribution to the solo debut by
Ryan Adams, Heartbreaker, as an almost subliminal experience.

"We did it really quick," she remembers, "we did it really late
at night. When the record came out and we heard it, we honestly
couldn't tell which one of us was singing what."

Welch sees the blurring of roles as indicative of their close
musical relationship. "At this point we've been playing together
for a while, and a lot of the communication that goes on, it's kind
of non-verbal. We're really good, at this point, at intuitive
decisions."

Welch's musical ideals are guided by her own high standards and
those of the musicians she admires. "In my record collection," she
says, "there are no categories. There's just the great records. And
I'm just striving to get a record up into that group. I wanna make
a great record. Not for some prize or some label; it's just that
the great records - time passes, and they remain important to
people, and they really mean something to people.

"It's the desire not to stand up in front of people and ever
have cause to be embarrassed. I always want to be standing up there
playing music that I'm proud of."

The source of the music, however, remains essentially mysterious
to Welch. "I wish I had a better idea," she says of her creative
process, "because maybe I could do it faster. But I guess I should
be happy that I've managed to make as much as I have so far. Some
people never get four albums under their belt.

"I don't know how to really say this, but I haven't really done
what I wanted to do yet. I haven't really gotten it exactly right
yet, if you know what I mean. I'm not satisfied, and I think that
keeps artists making art, that there's still stuff you want to do.
If you've done what you want to do, then it's too miserable a
chore, really."

As a teenager, Welch was a Grateful Dead fan - "just a little
Deadhead", as she sings on Wrecking Ball - and she quotes
the Dead's departed leader on the pain of songwriting. "I just read
this quote from Jerry Garcia, that he'd rather pitch cards into a
hat all day than write a song. And that's kind of how I feel. It's
the hardest thing I do."

She's been deep in the difficulties of that process in recent
months, working on her next album. "So, consequently, I'm
miserable," she quips. "But at least I'm cheered that I still have
the desire to do the work. And there are some new songs kicking
around that I'm excited about, and we'll be playing some when we
come down and see you guys."

This is their first Australian tour, long overdue because of
Rawlings' deep-seated fear of flying. "We told them we would come,
but only if the plane ride to Australia would be the only one,"
Welch explains. The result is an unusual tour itinerary. The couple
are driving themselves down Australia's east coast, unaccompanied
by entourage, and their tour dates include obscure rural venues
such as the Meeniyan Hall in South Gippsland.

"I'm really glad that we're just gonna be driving around," Welch
enthuses, "seeing a little bit of the country and playing towns not
everybody goes to."

She jokingly warns Australian audiences not to expect too much
of a good time at a Gillian Welch concert. "I'm really not a
people-pleasing performer," she insists.

"Sometimes my partner and I joke that people don't come to our
shows to have a good time. It's not really party music.

"But I've talked to enough people now to realise that there are
other things that music can provide for people than ... " She
starts to laugh, self-deprecatingly. "...than an ass-shakin' good
time."

Gillian Welch plays at the Prince, St Kilda, next
Wednesday, Thursday and Friday (Thursday and Friday sold out); the
Palais in Hepburn Springs on Saturday, November 13 (sold out); and
the Meeniyan Hall on Sunday, November 14 (sold
out).